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Chapter 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Blindness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy
Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience
Biological Needs and Human Society
Narrative, Ideology, and Identity
Summary
Analysis
In the morning, the doctor’s wife tells the doctor that the group is almost out of food, so she needs to make another run to the supermarket store room. She remarks that caring for the others has worn her out, but she will keep persevering as long as she’s able. She and the doctor start bickering about why the doctor had sex with the girl with the glasses in the hospital, but then they go to breakfast. After eating, they go outside with the dog of tears and find the city even filthier and more dilapidated than before. Out of empathy and despair, the dog of tears howls at a corpse. The group again passes a crowd listening to blind speakers in a square, but this time, they are talking about “great organized systems” like the free market, and the criminal justice system, the military, and the government.
Saramago emphasizes that the doctor’s wife is a regular person acting out of a sense of moral responsibility, not a superhuman savior or messiah acting out of divine inspiration. Having spent the last several chapters leading the rest of the characters, the doctor’s wife admits that she is exhausted and that the burdens of her newfound job are difficult to carry. Indeed, this fear of responsibility—of being enslaved to others because of her extraordinary capacity to see—was what initially prevented her from taking decisive action in the hospital. The proto-political rally they pass in the square this time is a clear foil for the preacher they passed in the previous chapter, and this makes explicit Saramago’s comparison between religion and social organization (or politics) as different ways of giving meaning to human life. However, there is also an important difference between the distant, repressive Government in the novel and the kind of organic, small-scale community that the protagonists have formed. But Saramago leaves open the question of whether it is possible to have an entire society function like a commune, with everyone taking a personal stake in the wellbeing of everyone else.
Themes
The doctor’s wife checks the same street map where she first encountered the dog of tears, and then she leads her husband and the dog to the supermarket two blocks away. The doctor’s wife comments that nobody is entering or exiting and worries that the blind might have already cleared out the storeroom. A group of blind people next to her is confused to hear her talk about seeing, but they brush it off as a figure of speech. Inside, the supermarket is empty—both of food and people—and it smells like death. The dog whimpers anxiously as he follows the doctor and his wife to the door leading to the basement, where the smell only gets worse.
After passing by the site where she had her own breakdown and then was saved by the dog of tears, the doctor’s wife begins to reflect on her decision to say nothing about the supermarket’s basement storeroom. Just like the last time she entered the supermarket, here the doctor’s wife guides herself by smell—just as her blind companions have been doing throughout the book. In fact, the forbidding stench that she encounters here suggests that something is horribly wrong.
Themes
The doctor’s wife tells the doctor to wait upstairs while she goes down to the basement. On the staircase, the rotting stench makes the doctor’s wife vomit, and then she sees two low, flickering lights. The doctor rushes over to comfort her and lead her back into the hallway, where starts crying hysterically. She exclaims that “they are dead” and then explains that the blind must have fallen down the stairs in a pile before someone closed the door behind them, and that now the basement is essentially a mass grave. The doctor’s wife blames herself for this, because the blind probably went downstairs just after she ran outside. She concludes that all their food has essentially been stolen from others, meaning that they’re indirectly responsible for their deaths. She questions why her group has survived and worries that soon it will all come to an end.
The doctor’s wife collapses in agony when she realizes that she is to blame for the deaths of so many blind people in exactly the way that she earlier predicted might happen if she did tell the blind scavengers about the hidden storeroom. This forces her into a moral reckoning even more serious than what she underwent after killing the thugs’ leader and after losing herself on the way back from this same supermarket. In a sense, she begins to feel that she is letting down the rest of the world by prioritizing her group. A symptom of the unfortunate fact that even the most noble people cannot save everyone, her confusion and despair are a reminder that people’s capacity for good is ultimately limited by the situations in which they find themselves. People like the doctor’s wife must find a means and a motivation to keep acting selflessly, despite knowing that their actions will prove imperfect or even futile.
Themes
Outside the supermarket, the doctor’s wife realizes that she needs to lie down, and she spots a church across the street that would be “a good place to rest.” The doctor guides his wife across the street, where she helps him climb the six steps to the church’s front door. Knowing that dogs aren’t allowed inside churches, the dog of tears hesitates but enters, nonetheless. The church is completely packed with people, but the dog growls at some blind people so that they make space for the doctor’s wife, who lays down and loses consciousness. The doctor sits her up to improve her circulation, and she slowly wakes up and starts to see again.
The church’s six front steps immediately recall the six steps leading up to the quarantine hospital. Indeed, both places are tightly packed with blind people seeking meaning, salvation, and sight—but Saramago seems to be suggesting that the churchgoers are imprisoned by their religion, much like the internees were imprisoned in the hospital. The dog of tears demonstrates a surprisingly deep awareness of human customs, which separates him not only from other dogs, but also from the blind characters who populate the rest of the book. By bridging the gap between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, the dog of tears shows how humans are simply animals—but this does not mean they lack qualities like empathy and reason.
Themes
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When she comes to her senses, the doctor’s wife sees that the eyes of all the images in the church are covered with paint or strips of cloth, except for one woman who has gouged-out eyes that she carries on a tray. The doctor’s wife tells the doctor about this, and they wonder whether someone who lost their faith might have covered the images’ eyes out of spite, or if the local priest decided that the images should be blind like everyone else. The doctor’s wife claims that she is also going blind now that there is nobody left to see her. She and the doctor wonder whether the blindfolds dignify their suffering and conclude that this is “the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions, the fairest and most radically human.” The priest who did this is, the doctor says, was essentially making the statement that not even God should be allowed to see.
The remarkable, sacrilegious sight of the church full of blinded images is Saramago’s attempt to declare that people must turn to themselves for a “radically human” kind of salvation. Whether because no benevolent God would allow such horrors or because no God could understand them, the blinded figures represent humanity breaking with faith and taking matters into its own hands, even if the future is uncertain and indeterminate. The women with gouged-out eyes stands out as a foil for the doctor’s wife, the only character who has not been blinded but who offers her sight to others, as though to facilitate humankind’s acceptance of responsibility for itself.
Themes
The blind people surrounding the doctor’s wife and the doctor begin to ask about the covered images and question how the doctor’s wife knows about them. As news spreads around the church, people are dubious but alarmed. The people start to scream in horror, and they panic and collectively flee the church. Meanwhile, the doctor and his wife “take advantage of the misfortune of others” by stealing some of the food that the escaped worshippers left behind.
The astonished worshippers, likely inspired by the pious Portuguese Catholics who surrounded Saramago, struggle to make sense of the notion that God will not save them—while the doctor and his wife seem to have already accepted this. Of course, their morally questionable decision to steal food from the blind worshippers reminds the reader that human beings’ responsibility for their own existence does not necessarily make them benevolent.
Themes
Back at the doctor and his wife’s house, their companions are shocked and dismayed to hear about their day, but they have different feelings about the blinded images in the church: the first blind man and his wife consider it inexcusably disrespectful, while the man with the eyepatch finds it humorous. The group eats the food that the doctor and his wife have brought home and start planning to abandon the city and go to the countryside instead, where food is more abundant. In the evening, although there is no food, the group still crowds around the doctor’s wife to listen to her read.
Although they do not reach any agreement about the moral implications of what the doctor and his wife have seen, the group of protagonists gleefully eats the stolen food; readers can only speculate about how this might have affected other blind people. In short, while their collective spirit has helped them survive and band together, the group’s survival is contingent upon hoarding resources, just like the thugs in the hospital. With this, Saramago poses the question of whether one group’s salvation might always mean another’s devastation.
Themes
While the doctor’s wife reads, some of the others drift off to sleep. The first blind man has his eyes closed, but he’s preoccupied with the plan to move to the countryside. When he starts seeing dark instead of white, he thinks he has fallen asleep, and then that he has gone from white-blind to dark-blind. He tells the first blind man’s wife that he is blind, and then he opens his eyes and starts yelling out that he can see. After embracing his wife, he hugs all of his other companions, most of whom he is seeing for the first time. The doctor remarks that perhaps the blindness is coming to an end and that they’ll all regain their eyesight. The doctor’s wife starts crying out of joy, and the dog of tears goes over to lick up her tears.
The protagonists regain their sight as suddenly and inexplicably as they lost it in the first place: it has no clear moral cause or implication, and even now, nobody understands what made them blind in the first place. Nevertheless, just as the mystery of their blindness did not change the struggles they faced at the beginning of the book, now they enjoy the return of their sight without striving to draw moral lessons or explanations from it.
Themes
The group starts chattering anxiously, and the first blind man and his wife plan their return home. A few hours later, the girl with the glasses also starts seeing again. She immediately embraces the doctor’s wife and then goes to the man with the eyepatch and resolves to stay with him even though she now sees that he is wrinkly and bald. In the morning, the doctor is able to see, and people outside start triumphantly yelling that they can see, too. In this atmosphere of celebration, the protagonists’ memories of going blind feel alien. Still, the protagonists wonder if they’ll ever learn why they went blind, and one of them suggests that they didn’t really go blind—rather, they were already “blind people who can see, but do not see.” Looking out the window, the doctor’s wife wonders if she will now go blind—but she does not.
It might be difficult for readers to accept that a book so concerned with confronting human evil can end on such a short-lived optimistic turn. But ultimately—through the character of the doctor’s wife, the romance between the girl with the glasses and the old man, and the protagonists’ return to sight—Saramago shows that the human capacity for benevolence is just as profound as their ability to injure and exploit one another, and that people’s good luck can be just as sudden and transformative as their bad luck. Ultimately, then, he suggests that people have much more power to change the world than they generally believe—but that their capacities are limited. Although the reader does not learn what the protagonists do with their newfound sight, it is clear that their trials have left them with a moral and spiritual fortitude that they lacked at the beginning of the book. In other words, their physical blindness has brought them to spiritual vision— perhaps this means that everyone must go through their own trials in order to seek their personal freedom and future.
Themes
